What are habits?

When we talk of habits, we often fail to recognize the habits we have picked up through the journey of civilization. If we look at habits as of 3 types, then we can understand this.

The first type is biological – these habits are of the nature that apply to our repetitive response to input through our 5 senses and what we know as instinct. The moment the brain starts to process the data, when we start to name it, conditioning takes over.

The second type is physical – This includes all things in our environment, the materials with shape and form. We have words that encompass the description so that as soon as we say the word, the thing is in our consciousness. This habit of automatically converting elements of our environment into words, and then assuming we understand it, may lead to the fallacy of over-simplification, and the disinclination to view anything as it is.

The third type of habit is psychological – our minds process information in the context of memory. Which means everything we think is actually based in a past that is not existing. We accumulate experiences and consign them to memory, which then constructs our perceptions and our prejudices. Our beliefs, our knowledge, our values are all part of this psychological habit, which we consider as a truth, but which in reality is an illusion, a figment of our imagination.

Education needs to help each generation break these psychological habits and encourage the development of real intelligence, that which is present and sees everything afresh.